Switch to open source successfully completed, city of Munich says – Munich’s switch to open-source software has been successfully completed, with the vast majority of the public administration’s users now running its own version of Linux, city officials said Thursday. (pcworld.com)

Valve’s SteamOS Now Available To Download; Linux Virgins Cautioned – Valve’s SteamOS is now freely available for download, but be warned that the installation procedure and general use is aimed squarely at the technically savvy for now. (forbes.com) (techland.time.com)

Debian-based SteamOS. Wait… what? Debian? SRSLY? – SteamOS was expected to be built on top of Ubuntu itself. Quite surprisingly instead, SteamOS is Debian-based.(blog.andreacolangelo.com)

Everything you need to know to install SteamOS on your very own computer – Contrary to Valve’s warning, the install wasn’t complex or scary at all—though if you’ve never installed Linux before, it might take you a bit out of your comfort zone. (arstechnica.com)

Main Topic:

News of the Year 2013… as seen by the mintCast

Podcast Announcements:

mintCast is taking a break for the Christmas holidays. We will not be producing a show until the first week of January 2014. Check the mintCast Community on Google+ for the details.

Jonathan Nadeau is launching an indiegogo campaign to help bring digital sight to the vision impaired. Further developing the Orca screen reader for vision impaired users to access a computer. (www.igg.me/at/orca)

Hacker Public Radio will be running a 24-hour New Year’s show again this year. Remember this is not an “HPR Show”, but rather we are providing a platform for the community to get together to wish each other a happy new year. (hackerpublicradio.org)